Appearing on Friday’s edition of Real Time, the always hyperbolic MSNBC talking head Donny Deutsch referred to Donald Trump as an “all-out dictator” and warned that “whatever the worst tyrants in history were capable of doing, he is capable of doing.” Host Bill Maher also subscribed to the “Trump is a dictator” narrative, arguing that he checked off more items on the “dictator checklist” over the past week and worrying that eventually, the only people remaining in the Trump administration will be “the Goebbels,” comparing the President’s closest advisors to Hitler’s propaganda minister.
As he introduced his panel, Maher noted how he has “many times read the dictator checklist on our show, the things Donald Trump does that are like a dictator.” According to Maher, Trump is a dictator because he “appoints family members,” holds “scary rallies, says ‘lock up my opponents,’ is in it for personal financial gain, (and) loves other dictators.”
Reflecting on the events of the past week, Maher argued that the President “added like five to the list” by “calling people human scum, physically disrupting hearings (and) investigating the investigators.” When Maher asked Deutsch to weigh in, the comparisons of Trump to a dictator continued. Deutsch began his rant by complaining that claiming Trump has “authoritative tendencies” does not go far enough, declaring “he is an all-out dictator.”
The MSNBC personality also referred to the President as a “sociopath,” adding “whatever the worst tyrants in history were capable of doing, he is capable of doing. We all keep saying it can’t happen here…it is happening here! And people need to be frightened.” Later, Deutsch recycled a talking point he recited on Morning Joe earlier in the week by claiming that Trump was “owned by Putin” and expressed a ridiculous concern to Maher that “you and I could end up in jail really easily.”
Towards the end of the panel discussion, Maher praised diplomat Bill Taylor, who testified as part of the impeachment inquiry earlier this week, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former CIA Director John Brennan as “straight arrows” and “deep state heroes.” Maher expressed his dismay that “I feel like little by little, they’re getting rid of all of them and then it’s just going to be the Bill Barrs and the Stephen Millers and the lackeys and the Goebbels.”
As the discussion came to a close, Deutsch asked “who is he (Trump) good for?” Maher responded: “The only thing that saves him is the base, it’s the people.” The HBO host explained “that’s who you have to get to,” proceeding to complain “that’s very hard when you have state TV, when they only watch Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and QAnon.”
Perhaps it never occurred to Maher and the legacy media that they would have an easier time “getting to” Trump supporters if they didn’t spend so much time comparing the President to a dictator.
A transcript of the relevant portion of Friday’s edition of Real Time is below. Click “expand” to read more.
Real Time With Bill Maher
10/25/19
10:21 PM
BILL MAHER: So, I have many times read the dictator checklist on our show, the things Donald Trump does that are like a dictator. I’m not going to read the whole thing again. You know most of them: appoints family members, scary rallies, says lock up my opponents, is in it for personal financial gain, loves other dictators, state run TV, parades…this week though, wow. He added like five to the list: calling people human scum, physically disrupting hearings, when it gets physical, investigating the investigators, he said “You people and your phony emoluments clause.” It’s, you know, in the Constitution. I’ll get to the ethnic cleansing in a little while but I…I feel like this is the “not going gently” edition of the dictator checklist. This is not…he is…it’s going to get uglier. You…you think he’s just going to let us take him out of there? No, human scum, he is not. It’s going to be human scum and goons breaking up meetings and I don’t know what’s next, what are your predictions?
DONNY DEUTSCH: You know, we use the term authoritative tendencies. Let…let’s stop with that. He is an all-out dictator. You know, I took a lot of heat on my show going through Nazi Germany in the…in the 30s and the parallels and what I will say is this and I’ve known Donald Trump for 20 years. He’s a sociopath and whatever the worst tyrants in history were capable of doing, he is capable of doing. We all keep saying it can’t happen here, it can’t happen here…it is happening here! And people need to be frightened.
(APPLAUSE)
MAHER: Would you go that far?
REP. ELISSA SLOTKIN: I mean, listen, I think, for me, watching what’s going on is just…especially as a former CIA officer, former Pentagon official, my husband served 30 years in the army, it’s just fundamentally unbecoming of the country that I served and that we all love and I feel that every single day. It’s the only thing that could have gotten me into politics and it’s what I wake up every day and still feel. I think that the President, for all he’s talked about doing things for people, should try and focus on issues that matter to people; their pocketbooks and their kids and not just obsessively…
DEUTSCH: We’re so past that. We are so past…
SLOTKIN: Not in the district I’m from. No.
DEUTSCH: I’m not saying what…what voters want…
MAHER: Right.
DEUTSCH: …but…
MAHER: Right.
DEUTSCH: …expecting this guy to do that?
SLOTKIN: Yeah. I…
DEUTSCH: …serve any other God but himself?
SLOTKIN: I…I…I understand but I…I think while the back and forth and the bickering are going on…
MAHER: But you’re for impeachment now and you weren’t for when it was about Russia and Mueller?
SLOTKIN: Yeah.
MAHER: What, this…this is different…it must be the fact that people in your district see it differently.
SLOTKIN: I don’t know how differently they see it but for me that very, very basic idea that the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, reached out to a foreigner, foreign leader and asked for information on an American, to me that was beyond the pale. It threatened…
MAHER: And that wasn’t “Russia, if you’re listening”…that wasn’t the same?
SLOTKIN: One because…
(APPLAUSE)
SLOTKIN: I think it’s different.
MAHER: Okay.
SLOTKIN: First of all, on Chris Cuomo’s show, we have the President’s lawyer and then later the President acknowledging what they did and it’s also prospective not retrospective, right? It’s not about what happened in the past, it’s what is happening right now for…
MAHER: Okay.
SLOTKIN: …2020. And for me, I’d always said and a lot of people in my district still feel like, you know what, I don’t love Donald Trump but let’s let the election decide and then he came out and said he was trying to muck with the election. So, that ability to sort of stand back and say, you know what, I…I pledged an oath to the Constitution but I’m just going to sit back…for me and others like me with a national security background, we came out together.
MAHER: It seems like there’s a lot of…lot of Democrats…
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
MAHER: It seems like there’s a lot of Democrats with…with a profile like yours. It used to be the Republicans…you’re C, CIA…I’m repped by CAA, that’s why I hesitated.
(LAUGHTER)
SLOTKIN: I’m not from the CAA.
MAHER: And…and now like, the Republicans are gym teachers. You know, it’s the Democrats who seem to be the…the ones who are the warriors and yet they still don’t get the benefit of the doubt on what…I asked this every week but how do they get away, the Republicans with doing this unpatriotic shit? He lost Syria! I mean, the Democrats lost one consulate in Benghazi, you’d think the world came to an end.
DEUTSCH: Can you imagine if Obama had made the military or nonmilitary moves that Trump just made…
MAHER: I, I…
DEUTSCH: …what, what they would be doing to him right now? And, you know, what’s very interesting is what Donald Trump did last week, he made all of you less safe. There are 100 ISIS fighters that were let out of jail…
(APPLAUSE)
DEUTSCH: Iran and Russia now have a foothold in the Middle East, he is owned by Putin, he made you and me and our children less safe. It’s as simple as that.
DAN CARLIN: Let me look on the bright side here for a second because there is another way to look at this and that’s…I remember after Watergate, people saying it was good that Watergate happened, it was good that somebody went too far, and you got a chance for the Constitutional republic to bounce back a little bit. I’ve been saying for years that the growth of the imperial presidency, along with a bazillion other people, is a problem but you almost have to get somebody in there who starts playing with the levers and the switches in such a way that’s so irresponsible that everybody can go, yeah, you know, this is a problem. This is a guy who runs an executive branch that’s stronger vis-à-vis the other branches of government than we’ve ever had.
MAHER: But they’re not. If, I mean, that would be great and that scenario would be…work out perfectly.
CARLIN: It’s up to the people, isn’t it? We’ve got to…
MAHER: …if his approval rating was 11 percent. But it’s not. Moody’s just came out and said he’s going to win next time by our calculations and he could. He…he did last time when no one thought he could.
DEUTSCH: We…we run a socialist, he damn well will…might win.
MAHER: Say that again.
DEUTSCH: Just like what Chris Cuomo said before, we run somebody who…
MAHER: Yes.
MAHER: …he can label a socialist, he will win the election.
MAHER: It’s…it’s funny, these labels, socialist…
(CROSSTALK)
MAHER: He’s now investigating the investigators. I mean, Bill Barr, he’s the Attorney General, he’s going through Europe looking…hunting down conspiracy theories, is this what the Attorney General of the United States is supposed to be doing?
SLOTKIN: Yeah.
MAHER: I thought he was supposed to be draining our swamp, he’s over there in Italy and Australia, and Britain; hunting down this nonsense.
DEUTSCH: You left out something in your dictator list, beyond create an other, all of a sudden, the Justice Department is not an…and individual branch, it serves not only at the pleasure of the President but for and on behalf of the President. You…by the way, you and I could end up in jail really easily.
MAHER: Oh, I…believe me I…
DEUTSCH: I mean, we…we’re not that far from that. We really are…
MAHER: And that’s one reason…
DEUTSCH: …I’m a doom and gloom guy but I really believe it’s this bad.
MAHER: I…believe me, that’s why I don’t eat pot anymore…
CARLIN: Look, which is the Attorney…
MAHER: Because when I eat it, I get paranoid…
CARLIN: Which is the…
MAHER: … and that’s what I think about.
CARLIN: Which is the Attorney General, though?
MAHER: That’s the truth.
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
MAHER: It’s legal here.
CARLIN: I guess I’m trying to think of the Attorney General, though, that was really seemingly on…on the side of either the executive branch or the people or whatever. I think of Edwin Meese, I think of John Mitchell, I think of all these guys…all these guys that seem like their job is really to protect the President and then we think it’s strange when this guy does what all the other Attorney Generals…Attorneys General do.
SLOTKIN: No, I’m sorry. This is different and I say this is a former CIA officer, what…leadership climate is set from the top. This President, from the very beginning, has been attacking his own institutions, the CIA, the intelligence…
MAHER: Yes.
SLOTKIN: …community, the Department of Justice, the FBI and one of the hardest things for me, I did a bunch of town halls after I came out for an impeachment inquiry, the hardest thing for me was hearing people say that the President had to go to foreigners to investigate his rivals because he couldn’t trust his own FBI and his own CIA…do you know how crazy that is? These people…
MAHER: I’m sure.
SLOTKIN: …wake up every single day and protect the country…
MAHER: Hey.
SLOTKIN: …and…and they do it, like, with their heads down, nose to the…
MAHER: Right.
SLOTKIN: …grindstone and it…it is one of the most difficult things for those of us who have worked in the service…
MAHER: You know, Senator…
SLOTKIN: …to stomach, it is not normal.
MAHER: A Republican Senator…
(APPLAUSE)
MAHER: …said that last week; Senator Ron Johnson. He says, Republican Senator, they asked him. Chuck Todd asked him “Do you trust the FBI?” No.
SLOTKIN: It’s like…
MAHER: Do you trust the CIA?
SLOTKIN: It’s like the coach of the team…
MAHER: So…
SLOTKIN: …attacking the running…
MAHER: …and when I saw this guy…
SLOTKIN: …back and the quarterback, it’s just…
MAHER: …Bill Taylor, you know, he’s just…I’ve seen so many of these guys, even Comey who obviously rat fucked the election with that letter but I don’t think he did it on purpose. I don’t know…I think he’s a straight arrow. And…and…and Clapper and Brennan, all these straight arrows and Bill Taylor, and I just…what I worry about is how many more of them are left? These deep state heroes, I feel like little by little, they’re getting rid of all of them and then it’s just going to be the Bill Barrs and the Stephen Millers and the lackeys…
DEUTSCH: Let me give you…
MAHER: …and the Goebbels.
DEUTSCH: …give a little sunshine. There’s…to me, the fact…
MAHER: Sunshine?
DEUTSCH: A little sunshine.
MAHER: It’s contagious from him.
DEUTSCH: You get it…there’s something that I’ll call the global international economic military industrial cultural complex…the universe, and he has basically shat on every institution you can shit…
MAHER: Right.
DEUTSCH: Shat, shit…shit on. Okay? That basically, when you get the feeling at some point it’s going to swallow him up. You can’t…nobody is bigger than the house and he has come in and said and right now, he has not been swallowed. But something tells you when you…when you…when you dump on…dump on the military, when you dump on Congress…
MAHER: Right.
DEUTSCH: …when you dump on the FBI…
MAHER: You’d think…
DEUTSCH: when you dump on the media, when you…at some point because who is he really good for at this point?
MAHER: Exactly.
DEUTSCH: Who is he good for? You know the Republicans want him out.
MAHER: It’s just…it’s…the only thing that saves him is the base, it’s the people. If he didn’t have that 35 percent of people who love him more than they love their own Congressman, that’s what keeps the Republicans in line. That’s who you have to get to and that’s very hard when you have state TV, when they only watch Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and QAnon.
